“... reviews and lectures that he did write fill a sizeable volume). Despairing confessions of failure, self-exhortations to patience, the jubilant acknowledgment of gifts of poems – all set down in the poet’s exquisite round hand (the hand he adopted at the same time as he Germanised his name from René to Rainer, in 1897): these form the substance of poems ...”

“... ethically fundamental. There is a shift from ‘Apparently altruistic behaviour is commonly self-seeking’ (which continues to privilege real altruism as a virtue) to ‘Altruism, pity etc are themselves contemptible, forms of weakness, a lowering of health’ (the notorious attack on pity in Antichrist is of this kind). Yet even in these shocking ...”

“... relatively cosy time he had been having in Vienna. If Leonore could be said to spring from that self which continually searches for the ideal in the face of fear, Fidelio, by contrast, represents Beethoven’s more settled, static response to tyranny and injustice, freedom and self-sacrifice.’ Leonore’s ...”

“... or calming. And it is oneself one is trying to tame, not just the other. The other in sex is the self we desire and fear.Dominance and submission … I am guessing that this is the aspect of Delacroix’s vision that most makes present-day viewers wince. But Delacroix is unequivocal. Maybe in the years following Sardanapalus he decided not to state the case ...”

“... been led by their subject. The first room is a pure piece of crowd-pleasing twaddle, filled with self-portraits from across Sickert’s career, some of them important works, that have been sundered from their natural bedfellows elsewhere. (More on this later.)Sickert would not have been Sickert without two early mentors, Whistler and Degas. He was a ...”

“... resonant images came more naturally to him. And it was cadence and image that energised him, not self-revelation. In a letter from 1960, before he had published anything, he wrote: ‘The common notion that you can make art out of your life, refinement of pleasure etc, is pure moonshine as far as I see it. There must be some morality. You might as well call ...”

“... of this new feminine ideal. Everyone was aiming at it, but Miller at 18 apparently had a cool self-assurance and a strong-willed, unforced recklessness, along with a sense of humour, that blended with her great natural beauty to make her instantly magnetic. With no specific ambition, training or calling, her success was certain – but as ...”

“... it is the most strenuous act of the poetic mind. Hopkins therefore commands himself – in a self-directed imperative, a form not uncommon in poetry – to ‘buckle’ those psychically assimilated qualities to his own ‘stirred’ heart, alchemising them into the subjective world of feeling, and thereby generating the imagination that renders them ...”

“... shot through with personal grudges and unverifiable anecdotes – portrayed a deceitful, self-deceiving man; Thompson introduced Frost’s Selected Letters by noting his ‘manner of seeming to be so natural, direct and confiding in all forms of communication; but he was never as natural as he seemed.’ Sheehy, Richardson and Faggen are keen to set ...”

“... he wrote in a newspaper article in 1917, to renounce lascivious aestheticism and exoticism, the self-betraying tendency to barbarism it pandered to in an unbridled way, taboo crazes in clothes styles and foolish infantilisms in its art, and adopt an attitude of noble rejection of anthropophagic sculpture and South American harbour-saloon dances … Yes, let ...”

“... worked on making the plane at home – was an unusual man. He had a seriousness of purpose and a self-directed, unphoney Ohio groundedness, and he was extraordinarily calm about loudly and repeatedly being called a liar and a fake. The entirely unfounded refusal to believe in his feats had no effect on him. He knew what he and Orville had done, knew that the ...”

“... that it reminds us, in the face of much contrary temptation, not to underestimate Amis’s knowing self-awareness about himself and his writing. Or, putting it more briefly (as he did in recording, for Larkin’s delight, his response to an unimpressive poem by John Wain): ‘Could of told you that, shitface.’ Amis was not born into the literary purple, as ...”

“... too deliberately calculated, with an unconcealed but obscure polemic intention; it is decidedly self-possessed.’ Something of the poems’ self-possession would have come from the man who wrote them. ‘Polemic intention’, too, perhaps – for Oppen was soon in the thick of Depression politics and the writing had come ...”

“... old Baths. Uncanny pleasure moved within her like a full-rigged ship As if she entered her naked self Into a silky sea of ships; Great full-masters sailed across her breasts. Her smile in the office meant the tide was full, The draught sufficient, As the great barque in its weathered colours Glides past the window, pennant flying, In its weathered ...”

“... not. A voice worn all along its seams, I ought to stop listening. I ought to stop. The mind’s self-deceptions inspire awe. Its mountains. Must I walk there alone, without a guide? I do not know the things I know, they are folded into my routines imperceptibly. I do not see what there is to be seen, the way they tear the skin off an animal and fit it to ...”